Limited write endurance is one of the
factors that detractors bring up with regards to solid state drives
(SSDs). Most NAND
flash chips using multi-level cell (MLC)technology in SSDs have a
write endurance of around 10,000 cycles. That isn't as great a
problem in SSDs greater than 120GB that use wear-leveling technology,
but smaller sized SSDs have less capacity and will reach the upper
limit much quicker.

That issue is why almost all SSDs aimed at
the corporate and enterprise market use Single Level Cell flash
chips, which typically have a write endurance around the 100,000
cycle mark. These include Intel's X25-E, OCZ's Vertex EX and Agility
EX series, and Super
Talent's MasterDrive RX series.

Micron Technology is one
of the key partners in IM Flash Tech along with Intel Corporation.
IMFT produces the 34nm NAND flash used in Intel's
second generation X25-M SSDs using 2-bit-per-cell MLC chips.
Micron and IMFT have been working on improving the write endurance of
their NAND chips, and they have now reached a breakthrough.

“By
leveraging our mature 34nm NAND process, Micron has developed
Enterprise NAND products that support customers’ high-endurance
requirements. These products ensure that enterprise organizations
have a highly reliable NAND flash solution – be it MLC or SLC –
for design into the broader enterprise storage platform,” said
Brian Shirley, Vice President of Micron’s memory group.

The
company’s new 32Gb MLC Enterprise NAND devices achieve an
impressive 30,000 write cycles. They are also introducing a 16Gb SLC
Enterprise NAND device that achieves 300,000 write cycles. The new
chips also support the ONFI
2.1 synchronous interface, making them easier to integrate into
new products.

Both of these new chips are built on the 34nm
process which IMFT introduced last year, and can be configured into
multi-die, single packages supporting densities of up to 32GB for MLC
NAND and 16GB for SLC NAND.

Micron is now sampling its
Enterprise NAND products with customers and controller manufacturers,
and is expected to enter volume production at the beginning of 2010.

Comments

Threshold

Username

Password

remember me

This article is over a month old, voting and posting comments is disabled

Actually, we just decided to upgrade all of our users to SSD's. We noticed that the boot time alone went from 10-15 minutes from putting in a password to having outlook open, to 10-15 seconds. When you are a CPA billing $150 an hour saving 20 minutes a day makes a big difference. Not to mention any time we have to work on their laptops and do updates, or install new software we spend half the time, so instead of 30 minutes per PC to install CCH software it takes closer to 15. That adds up too.We found the payback on the SSD's ended up being less than 6 months.

Anyway, who really gets right to work in the morning? Most people turn their computer on and get some coffee. Some firms have their computers go to standby on log-off (for speed turning back on and backups/over-night updates).

I also doubt it took 10-15 minutes for the computer to boot up. The last time I had a computer take that long, was Pentium 3 days, which I hope you're not using with SSDs. In reality, it's probably closer to 6-8 minutes and it's now probably taking 1-3 minutes with the SSD. It's an improvement, but not as wide a margin as you make out.

You could have got the same improvement setting the workstations to go to standby instead of full power off. Updates could be applied overnight, eliminating that part of the argument too.

The only thing left is an increase in speed installing programs and that's really only limited to the speed of the optical drive or network.

Network administered PCs taking much longer to boot than normal home use PCs. The one I am on right now takes 10+ minutes to boot due to all of the network crap. Take it off the network and its probably much quicker. And yes it is the HDD that's the limiting factor in boot time.

Actually it DID take about 10 to 15 minutes. And I timed it taking 13 seconds now. You obviously have never worked on a CPA's network. The amount of software it has to load is incredible. Add in the 5+ GB of email, the Document add-on, the Engagement add-on, e-Tools and a host of scanning "junk" it takes a while.

I defined being booted as being in windows, outlook open, and you can click on the start menu with it popping up instead of grinding. To hit the power button and get to the logon screen took noticeably longer, but maybe in the 45 second neighborhood. Although that time tends to not be important because the last thing we have people do at night when they leave is restart so it is at Ctrl+Alt+Del when they come in the next morning.

The fact is that the only real limiting factor in most PC's today is getting the information from the hard drive to the memory. You can argue that perhaps I could have made them slightly faster by optimizing the fragmentation using JKdefrag or that perhaps I could have simply used bigger drives with higher platter density. But all of that messing around, spending time would have resulted in a few percentage difference. Not worth it. The SSD's are the biggest difference you can make in a PC today. Simply because it removes the single slowest bottleneck.

As a side note, yes, it really does make a difference in time when installing software. We use large SAS arrays with GB Ethernet to all of our PC's it was then limited by how fast it could copy to the drive.

You can disagree with me on some specific point or two but don't go down the road of being supreme knowledge in the universe. You aren't involved in our network, you don't know the layout, you don't know the software or the requirements. If you say that SSD's don't make a difference in your setup that's fine. I tend to think they would, but you can make that decision because I don't know your topology. For us, they made a huge difference.

"Paying an extra $500 for a computer in this environment -- same piece of hardware -- paying $500 more to get a logo on it? I think that's a more challenging proposition for the average person than it used to be." -- Steve Ballmer